Category: Web Development

Who Should You Design For? Picking the Right Personas

There are far more users for your application than you can possibly design for. Alan Cooper has some advice on how to pick the ones that will let you deliver the right UX for everyone. Most applications will have a wide variety of users. In UX design, we assume that we can group those users into groups […]

The First One’s Free: Making Your UX Habit Forming

It’s unlikely that the user experience that you’ll craft will ever be ‘fun’ for your users. But, on the other hand, you can support making your application a habit…and that’s almost as good. Let’s face it: most of our applications aren’t fun or exciting or immersive. Users don’t long to work with our applications — they regard […]

Helping Your Readers Read: The Two Things You Need to Know About Page Layout

Before your readers see your words, they see your page and then make a decision about whether or not they’ll read your document at all. These two tools are simple enough that you can use them in an email …and are all you need to ensure that your readers will go on to read your actual words. Which of […]

Leveraging Scenarios (Why Apps Fail Before They Even Get Started)

The financial planning site/application Wesabe failed because they didn’t understand how to use scenarios effectively. You can avoid that mistake by realizing that UX scenarios are about life, not about optimizing the human/computer interface. Wesabe was a financial management website/application that didn’t succeed. Instead, it lost out to Mint (which, by the way, was eventually bought […]

Ensuring Your Site Makes Sense to Your Users

There’s a simple four step process you can follow to make sure that your users can find their way to what they want in your site. How simple is it? Just let your users tell you how to organize your site’s pages. Ed Krol, author of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet,” described the Internet as “a library where all […]